ACROSTIC • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Acrostic

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noun

Acrostic n.

A composition, usually in verse, in which the first or the last letters of the lines, or certain other letters, taken in order, form a name, word, phrase, or motto.

A Hebrew poem in which the lines or stanzas begin with the letters of the alphabet in regular order (as Psalm cxix.). See Abecedarian.

Double acrostic, a species of enigma, in which words are to be guessed whose initial and final letters form other words.

Acrostical, Acrostic n. Pertaining to, or characterized by, acrostics.

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Etymology of 'Acrostic'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Acrostic" Quotes from Famous Books

... namesake that he wrote many letters about him. Nearly every ship that sailed for Boston brought a letter from him to the Franklin family, and almost every letter contained a piece of poetry from his pen. One of his letters about that time contained the following acrostic ...

— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer

... a superstitious encouragement in an acrostic which some ingenious journalist has constructed out of the names of the Commanders-in-Chief of the French and British armies. ...

— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood

... probably in that year that he wrote L'Amorosa Fiammetta and the allegorical prose pastoral (with songs interspersed) which he entitled Ameto, and in which Fiammetta masquerades in green as one of the nymphs. The Amorosa Visione, written about the same time, is not only an allegory but an acrostic, the initial letters of its fifteen hundred triplets composing two sonnets and a ballade in honour of Fiammetta, whom he here for once ventures to call by her true name. Later came the Teseide, or romance of Palamon and Arcite, the first extant rendering of the story, ...

— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... very sad I'm. I sent you, or I mistake myself foully, A very excellent imitation of the poet Cowley, Containing three very fair stanzas, Which number Longinus, a very critical man, says, And Aristotle, who was a critic ten times more caustic, To a nicety fits a valentine or an acrostic. And yet for all my pains to this moving epistle, I have got no answer, so I suppose I may go whistle. Perhaps you'd have preferred that like an old monk I had pattered on In the style and after the manner of the unfortunate Chatterton; Or ...

— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... wording belong to ingenuity rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the Persian poet who left out all the A's (as well as the poetry) in his verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour of Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew's Cross, a lozenge,—everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray endeavoured after when "copying the language of Queen Anne," and succeeded in attaining, was the spirit and ...

— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson